Peninsula readers' letters: July 22

From Daily News Group readers

Posted:
07/21/2014 06:14:40 PM PDT

Updated:
07/21/2014 11:07:08 PM PDT

Disproportionate response

Dear Editor: The Japanese killed just fewer than 2,400 Americans at Pearl Harbor. In retaliation, we firebombed Tokyo in March 1945, taking the lives of 100,000 Japanese, mostly civilians. The Germans killed approximately 60,000 British civilians in the London Blitz in 1940-1941. In retaliation over the next few years, the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Air Force killed about 10 times as many German civilians. Was Franklin D. Roosevelt guilty of a disproportionate response? Was Churchill more murderous than Hitler? The answer to both these questions is no. It was war and we did what we had to.

The use of the term "disproportionate response" in wartime has been applied to one state and one state only -- Israel. Although Hamas has been openly calling for the extermination of Jews and despite the fact that the people of Gaza overwhelmingly supported Hamas in the last election, leftists, progressives and New York Times op-ed writers have condemned Israel's response to a massive assault against its own citizens as disproportionate, even Hitlerian. People who somehow overlook the mountains of corpses produced by fanatics and dictators throughout the Arab world are incensed by the accidental killing of four Arab boys in Gaza by an Israeli rocket.

Advertisement

Apparently, Jews are to be held to a standard far higher than that of any nation or people. There is a term for such a standard; it's called anti-Semitism. And the venomous hatred directed at Israel today is not very much different from the venomous hatred directed at European Jewry 80 ago.

Bob Kantor,

Palo Alto

Good news for Hamas

Dear Editor: John Kerry's decision to fly to Cairo to work on a cease-fire is exactly the news that Hamas wanted to hear. They have already made it clear they don't care how many Palestinians die in the conflict they provoked, so long as the end result grants them the political concessions from Egypt that will further their cause. They know that if the U.S. was not prepared to pressure the Egyptian government to throw Hamas a bone or to force Israel to stop operations aimed at eliminating their rocket arsenal and blowing up their underground fortresses, there was no reason for Kerry to come to the region. A cease-fire that would grant Hamas no political victories didn't require the personal presence of the secretary of state in Cairo.

But by bending to the usual hypocritical international outcry against any Israeli attempt to take out the terror nest on its border, the administration is signaling that it won't let Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu take out Hamas or allow Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to stand his ground about sealing his country's border against infiltration from an ally of the Muslim Brotherhood he deposed.

Were Obama and Kerry prepared to show the kind of resolve that Netanyahu and el-Sisi have exhibited, it would be very bad news indeed for Hamas and its foreign cheerleaders that continue to nurture delusions about Israel's destruction. Instead, the U.S. appears to be as clueless as ever about the stakes involved in this fight and cracking under the pressure generated by the Palestinians sacrificed by Hamas on the altar of their jihadist mission. If so, the price paid by both Israelis and Palestinians in the future will be considerable.